Week 5: 4 May. HOW TO READ To the Lighthouse (1927)
PLOT
Time: circa 1909 [147, 192]
Place, the Hebrides, summer home of the Ramsays
Characters: 10 Ramsays, 5 guests, a cook, and a nanny
Action: Ramsays talk about making a visit to the lighthouse. Ten years later, they do.
Part One: “The Window.” An afternoon and evening in which an episodic topic of conversation is a plan to go to the lighthouse with a package. Will the weather be fine? Depends on who is talking to whom, and why. But all the men say No; Mrs. Ramsay says Yes. [3, 124]
Part Two: “Time Passes.” WWI intervenes. Mrs. R, Prue and Andrew die. One fold of the shawl [115] loosens [130]. Mrs. McNab opens then closes the windows. White flowers are set by the window, and Lily arrives.
Part Three. “The Lighthouse.” Ten years later: September 1919. Nancy Ramsay—who has not escaped “the horror of family life” [73] after all— prepares a package, and Mr. R, James and Cam set out for the lighthouse. Lily and Mr. Carmichael see them arrive. Lily finishes her painting.
THEME
“the extreme obscurity of human relationships” [171]
IMPORTANT SYMBOLS
Window [3,4,27,31,36,38, *98, 130, 141 etc]
Lighthouse; cf Mrs Ramsay’s “wedge of darkness” stroked by the third beam of the steadily-turning lamp: “she became the thing she looked at” [63]
“Hyacinth girl” moments: Mrs. R. identified significantly with flowers [14, 38, 181 etc]
POINT OF READING TL THIS WEEK:
HOW WOMEN PARTICIPATE IN THE WORK OF CIVILIZATION
M/f: ex 121, husband/wife
[as paradigm of male dominance]
F/m: ex 123-124, wife/husband
[as paradigm of female dominance]
F/f: ex 48-53, mother/daughter
[as paradigm of separation-individuation]
F/F: ex 174-176, Lily has “introjected” Mrs R
Lily’s recognition of the “fire” of primitive heterosexual libido, and her use of it as an artist
Closure in Lily’s vision, which arising from the pain of loss, empowers the completion of her artistic aim, 52ff, : “mother & child reduced without irreverence.” Everybody has a mother, but not everybody has to be a mother. Lily captures Mrs. R as Mother in a sublimating abstraction: 193, 201-202, 209
LECTURE FRIDAY 4 MAY:
Civilization and Its Discontents, in Freud’s confident claim:
Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable. [59]
Re Lily/ Mrs R: Lily is separating from the mother figure (the psychological “object” in Lily Briscoe, which she projects onto Mrs R) and achieving a different socail relation to her, one that brings independence from the narrow definition of womanhood under which Mrs. R offers her advice. This is not to say that the novel discredits Mrs. Ramsay, rahter that it reflewcts the historical change that brings women into social positions formerly reserved for men: “the business of civilization.”
As a way into this subject I want to remind you of the 3 creation myths that you read last quarter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book One. First “Man” was created as the highest of the animals, the creature able to “raise his face toward Heaven” and assess the gods. In his second creation, man sprang from the blood of giants, and became aggressive—“Contemptuous of gods, and murder-hungry, and violent.” In the third creation, after the flood that destroyed the world, the only remaining couple were instructed by the oracle to “throw their mother’s bones behind them:” the stones the man threw turned into men, the stones the woman threw turned into women. I said in my lecture in January that this “final” creation resulted in the establishment of gender as a fundamental principle of social organization. We are all of woman born, but we are appointed different roles in culture according sex. Both sexes become gendered by separating from early socialization by their biological mothers and being re-socialized by codes that govern the older generations of adults of the same sex. Thus while only women make babies, it’s the men who make men and the women who make women. Sex is given by nature, gender is produced by culture.
This is a useful parable for the purposes of thinking about To the Lighthouse, and particularly for thinking about the passages I selected for discussion today.
In the novel, Mrs. Ramsay is the idealized mother figure around whom all of the characters revolve. Everyone in the novel is characterized at some point or other in terms of their relation to this formidable woman—every single character.
And that is what I meant to indicate by pulling forward for your attention on Wednesday the passages that bring this principle of relationality into focus. I’ll quickly summarize:
1) M/F, 117-124:
This is what I’ll call, after Ovid, a “Deucalion & Pryhha” moment in the novel—the ideal married couple that stand as the progenitors of the human race. In this, the final scene of part one of To the Lighthouse, we see dramatized the elaborate balancing act that makes heterosexual complementarity possible. It’s a brilliant scene. Mrs. Ramsay enters the room desiring something, and observes that her husband does not want to be interrupted. She takes up her knitting and opens a book of poems. At the end of the scene, “she had triumphed again.” How so? We have watched her covertly monitor her husband, reading his mind, asserting her feminine intuition; and we have watched him covertly watching her read, silently reconfirming his masculine superiority (“for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book learned at all”). At the end of the scene he provides her the reproof she is seeking. And she provides him what he is seeking too. “She knew that he was thinking , You are more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself to be very beautiful”[123]. And she knows that the moment has come to smile at him, so that he will know she has read his mind; and she does, and he does, and “she had triumphed again. She had not said it: yet he knew.” Marriage as a union of opposites who know how to stay opposite doesn’t get any better than this, in all of literature.
F/F, 48-53, & 84:
HOWEVER Mrs. Ramsay’s is not the last triumph in the novel. That belongs to what I will describe as her resisting “daughter,” the artist lily Briscoe: “’Yes,’ she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, ‘I have had my vision.’” Let’s pause over that “Yes,” a word that famously ends the most celebrated Modernist novel of the century, Ulysses by James Joyce, in the voice of Molly Bloom : “…I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” To apply a contemporary critical term to that passage: Ulysses can be described as a “phallocentric” novel: one which represents the world from an identifiably masculine point of view. To the Lighthouse, in conscious opposition, is a gynocentric novel: one centered in the perspectives of the female characters. “Yes” is the first word in the first sentence of To the Lighthouse—where it is spoken by Mrs. Ramsay— and it is the first word in the last sentence, where it is thought by Lily Briscoe. Woolf builds into her novel the theme of female resistance to phallocentric culture by exploring the ambivalent relationship that prevails between these two female characters, Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe.
On pages 48-53 we enter Lily Briscoe’s mind as she contemplates what makes Mrs. Ramsay so superlatively admirable to men. “No woman could worship another woman in the way [Mr. Bankes] worshipped.” Why not? Lily’s mind slides along a set of assocations, to a memory of a visit Mrs. Ramsay paid to her bedroom late one night that summer. During that visit Mrs. Ramsay warns Lily that she must marry, because “an unmarried woman has missed the best of life.”[49]
But Lily doesn’t take Mrs. Ramsays advice. Instead she takes something else away from that night—two things in fact. First, Lily acquires a surprisingly pleasurable insight that Mrs. Ramsay doesn’t have a clue about who Lily Briscoe really is or what she desires. “she had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s lap and laughed and laughed and laughed…at the thought of Mrs. Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand.” [50] Why is this good? Because, I think, Mrs. Ramsay is offering Lily physical intimacy while retaining her status as an Other. Mrs. Ramsay’s advice does not require Lily’s acceptance. The two of them achieve a kind of balanced opposition in Lly’s mind, and Lily does not feel compelled to succumb to dominance by Mrs. Ramsay at this moment (though Lily does often feel, deeply, her social and physical inferiority to Mrs. Ramsay).
Second, and more important Lily Brisocoe receives a powerful affirmation of her female self from the sense of unity with Mrs. Ramsay she experiences that night, the sort of unity that Freud calls the “oceanic feeling” and that he speculates it is the mother’s power to bestow. Page 51: “it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! As she leaned her head against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.”
But something has happened. To translate into contemporary terms: that intimacy with Mrs. Ramsay has empowered Lily as an artist. This is the memory to which Lily has retreated under the pressure of inspection by the male gaze of William Bankes, who is interrogating her genially about what her painting “means.” Woolf shows us that this disquieting social moment sets in motion in Lily’s mind a set of associations back to an earlier encounter with Mrs. Ramsay’s “opposite” in the novel, Mr. Tansley (they almost rhyme). Lily recalls the way Mr Tansley more or less sneaked up behind her, stared at her painting and like Milton’s serpent hissed in her ear, words that come to mind as Lily stands looking at her canvas with Mr. Bankes. Page 48: “Women can’t paint, women can’t write.” The process of memory covers four pages in the novel but only an instant passes between Lily and Mr. Bankes before she is able to tell him, in so many words, what her painting is “about.” Page 52: “It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. …But she had made no attempt at likeness…Mr. Bankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence.” Yes, she says, Yes.
A final word about that scene of gynocentric empowerment: it is erotic without being phallic. Mrs. Ramsay seeks Lily out in her bedchamber late at night, and she acts seductively toward Lily, teasing her with confidences; and she takes Lily’s hand “lightly…for a moment” while she delivers her advice about marriage. Lily by turns lays her head in Mrs. Ramsays’ lap and leans against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee. They are physically and emotionally intimate. Moreover, the emotional tone of this moment, for Lily, is very intense; the intensity raises the question in the novel of whether Lily’s avoids marriage because she does not desire men, she desires women. But that is a phallocratic question, which the novel does not explore. It is enough that Lily’s mind puts a lot of exclamation points after Nothing happened. “Nothing! Nothing!” In this way the novel probes and questions and images the nature of erotic satisfaction as it centers on the mother, intending use to recognize, I think, how everything leads back to her, just as Freud thought.
Week 5, 4 May 2001 5